1. Technical Field
Example embodiments of the present invention relate in general to the field of a method of providing an embedded software development tool for supporting an embedded software development environment based on native building, and an apparatus thereof.
2. Related Art
An embedded system represents a system in which hardware and software are combined and dedicated to a particular function. The embedded system may include various information processing devices, for example, home appliances such as DVD players, MP3 players, digital cameras, TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines, medical devices, vehicles, aircraft and spacecraft.
With the recent development of the information processing technology, hardware and software incorporated into the embedded system has become to have improved performance, which contributes to the popularization of general-purpose embedded devices, such as smart phones, tablet PCs, and personal digital assistants (PDAs). In this regard, there have been efforts to develop embedded software capable of performing various and complex functions by using embedded software development tools.
The conventional embedded software development environment has been operated such that a host system for developing embedded software is separated from a target system for executing the developed software, due to the limited performance of the target system in hardware resources, such as a processor, a memory, an input/output (I/O) device, and a network device, and software resources, such as an operating system, system software and application software.
For example, the convention technology provides a cross-compile based embedded software development environment in which a host system compiles a source code written by a developer by using a compiler provided for a target system to generate an embedded software execution file converted into an object code, and transmits the generated embedded software execution file to the target system, and the target system executes the embedded software execution file received from the host system.
However, the cross-compile based embedded software development environment has a limitation in that embedded software to be executed in a target system is developed only when a host system secures a toolchain of the target system, therefore a great amount of cost and effort are required for acquiring a toolchain of a target system rather than for developing the embedded software. In addition, there is another limitation that a host system needs to secure a different toolchain if hardware and platform of a target system are changed, which confirms the inefficiency of the cross-compile based embedded software development environment.
In particular, a target system has to be able to load high-end hardware resources and software resources due to the development of information communication technologies, so there is a need for an embedded software development environment that is applicable to such a target system loading high-end hardware and software resources.